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Tuesday, November 25, 2008

20 Years Ago, A Legend was Born

New Delhi Television Ltd. started out as a small, private media production company, the first of its kind in India. It all began in November, 1988 with The World This Week, the only show on foreign affairs in India, on state-run DD.

Then, in the late 90s, NDTV signed a deal with Rupert Murdoch's Star and launched India's first private news channel, Star News. Presenting English news, the channel covered all the important events, including 9/11. However, NDTV and Star discontinued their alliance.

Star News moved to being a Hindi News channel, and NDTV launched two of its own channels: NDTV 24x7, India's #1 English News Channel, and NDTV India, India's top Hindi News Channel. In 2005, it launched NDTV Profit, India's #1 Business News Channel. For a good period after that, the company stuck to news.

Then, it finally broke free from the news segments and launched India's first and best lifestyle channel, NDTV Goodtimes. But before that, the company had already gone International, launching Astro Awani in Indonesia and Malaysia, and NDTV Arabia in the iddle East-North Africa.

Then, NDTV expanded even further into the non-news segment, launching NDTV Imagine, Imagine Showbiz and NDTV Lumiere. It also launched new ventures such as NDTV Labs. In 2008, NDTV signed a cooperation agreement with NBCU.

NDTV has tracked India from the early 90s onwards, giving an Indian perspective to the world. Today, every major National news channel is somehow associated with NDTV, be it CNN-IBN (Rajdeep Sardesai) or Times Now (Arnab Goswami). The channels has taken many risks, some of them paid off, some didn't. But it's future looks bright.

With great shows such as We, The People, The Big Fight and Documentary 24x7, and the high-quality journalism, NDTV seems all set to embrace the future.